LEGAL FRAMEWORK IN ROMANIA authority(labour inspectorate). Non-observance by the employer of the legal limits, especially rules on overtime and the weekly rest period, constitute administrative offences for which the employer may be fined. SPECIFIC RULES FOR TELEWORKING For telework(including online) activities, there are no rules derogating from the above-mentioned ones. Employees still cannot wave their rights provided by law. The Telework Law adds to the general rules already laid down in the Labour Code some specific provisions protecting employees' rights. According to this law, telework can be performed somewhere other than at the employer's premises at least one day a month(either entirely somewhere other than at the employer's offices or partly at the employer's offices and partly elsewhere) using information and communication technology. Telework is considered by the social partners to be both a means for companies to modernise the organisation of work, and a means for employees to balance their work and private lives. Thus, it is not aimed at allowing any expansion or breach of the stipulated limits on working time, nor is it intended to affect the work-life balance. In the case of the teleworking activity, the individual employment contract must state, in addition to general elements, the period and/or days when teleworkers are to perform their activities at the workplace organised by the employer, as well as the means of recording the working hours provided by the teleworker. According to this law, in order to fulfil their duties, teleworkers are to organise their work schedules by mutual agreement with their employer, in accordance with the provisions of the law. Thus, although more flexibility is provided for here, the work schedule must be agreed upon by both sides in order to keep clear evidence as required in the above-mentioned provisions of the Labour Code, the monitoring of online work performed by teleworkers being required to be as rigorous as in the case of the employees who work at the company's premises. Nor do the provisions governing overtime differ from this in any way. According to the Romanian Labour Code, Art. 120(2), the employee has the right to refuse to work overtime. The Telework Law stipulates under Art. 4(2) that if teleworkers agree to perform overtime, this consent must be provided in writing before the actual activity takes place. This is an additional requirement over and above employees working on the company's premises, as in the latter case no written consent from employees is required(this consent is presumed to be provided by the very act of performing overtime). Request of overtime by the employer and/or acceptance of overtime work by teleworkers, in the absence of any written consent from them, is deemed to constitute an administrative offence and is subject to fines. they cannot be legally forced to stay connected or to respond to requests from the employer outside working hours agreed with the employer as described above. Consequently, employees (including teleworkers) cannot be sanctioned for misconduct for refusing to respond /work outside working hours or respond to a request communicated by the employer outside working hours. If, however, such sanctions were applied, they would be deemed to be null and void by a court of law. Given all the above, it appears that existing legislation has been considered sufficient to protect employees. On the other hand, from a social perspective, overtime has not been considered as having a potentially detrimental effect on workers' health for decades. However, this does not mean that in reality employees do not perform work outside regular working hours or, more serious, exceed legal limits on overtime and on daily and/or weekly working time, but generally speaking such situations are not reflected in the records of times worked and are not reported, either. However, in such cases the parties involved are violating legal provisions and they may be subject to sanctions by the labour authorities. This means that the main problem is not a lack of legislation protecting employees and their right to be disconnected from work, but the implementation/observance of this legislation, because in practice employees often continue to work outside working hours, even if they theoretically have the right not to do so. Thus, it was considered that in Romania the solution for better protection of employees would not be the adoption of a new arrangement in the matter, but the observance of the already existing one. Current opinions on the need to adopt new arrangements in this matter may change because the factual situation of teleworkers working“around the clock” who are not able to place limits on their working time is getting more serious and may dramatically affect their health(stress, burnout) and their work-life balance (affecting their private/family lives). It must be also highlighted within this context the particular situation of the banking, insurance and retail industries, where in some cases employees work with applications to which they are connected and which do not operate outside of working hours. Thus, they cannot receive communications from clients outside of working hours and, consequently, they are not requested to respond, as they are practically disconnected from the applications they use for their work. As a result, it would appear that so far there has not been any need to regulate the teleworkers' right to disconnect, since 5